


Like Real People Do

by waywardmelody



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Boys Kissing, Feelings Realization, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 08:33:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12837351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waywardmelody/pseuds/waywardmelody
Summary: “Do you want to know what I’m doing out here,” Ignis asked.It would have been dishonest to say he wasn’t curious, but that wasn’t why he came out to check on him. In the many years he’d know Ignis, he’d never known him to be disheveled. Even upon finding him in Altissia, when he’d been discovered battered and broken, spread out between sharp ends of rubble and glass, he’d more closely resembled a man who was hurt than one who hadn’t take care.This Ignis was unkept in a way Gladio had never seen him. His sandy hair stuck up in haphazard peaks, perfect coif disturbed. He was on his knees; dust of burnt sienna having seeped into the fabric of his pajamas in a way in which would not ever clean. But his hands, his hands, were the most telling. The long elegant fingers were stained, too, ruddy clay beneath the nails which were cracked and torn and sluggishly bleeding. Beside him was a pile of displaced dirt, the swell of it telling that something was banished beneath the granules. He’d buried something but Gladio’s concern was completely focused on the man rather than what he’d been doing.“Not unless you want to tell me.”





	Like Real People Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sauronix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sauronix/gifts).



> For my Gladnis Girl, Nix. I heart you and the boys, so it seems a fitting tribute.

In the years Noctis was locked away in the crystal, it was difficult for the Gladio, Ignis and Prompto to be together. To occupy the same space was painful. Though none of them had ever given voice to it, least of all Gladio, there was an unspoken thread, a feeling like a live wire touched to skin which spoke of failure. Gladio couldn’t be sure what Ignis and Prompto felt guilty over, though, if pressed, he could hazard a guess. Prompto with his perpetual friendliness, probably felt as if he’d let down his best friend by not being present. He suspected that Ignis’ guilt more closely aligned with his own, an inability to protect that which they’d sworn, on penalty of death, to defend. To see Noctis lost to preternatural slumber left a fissure in his shape in each of their consciousness. To come together for any length of time was to be reminded of what was no longer there. It was to recall that Noct was gone and that his return, though heralded, wasn’t promised nor was a time frame given. To look at them had filled Gladio with shame. It was a taint he had not been able to clean despite his best endeavors. He assumed it would always be that way.

Then Noctis returned. He brought back the dawn, and saved the world with a sacrifice unparalleled through the ages. He was gone as swiftly as he had come, lost in a way that could not be explained or hoped away. He was found locked in an embrace of death that saw him impaled upon his own swords, pinned to the throne like a butterfly within a specimen box. That was what Noctis became to the people, something worthy of study and mention. They would never know him. They would never mention his shortcomings or his humor or the soft, shy way he sometimes smiled. They would never know his affinity for fishing or how difficult he was to wake.

In the end, with Noct gone for good, there was a need that only they could fulfill for each other. There was a thread of pain, a permanence etched onto their beings which colored their interactions. There was also a shared history only they could hold. Together they had found a place with separate rooms, some shit hole with thinned patches of grass on the outside of thinner walls. It kept them separated, but also kept them together. Though he wasn’t happy, though the idea of happiness was nearly incomprehensible, being with Ignis and Prompto allowed Gladio some semblance of peace. Being away from them proved as hard as being around them had been before. There was a sense of incompletion without them. They moved in hurried circles, yelling when one took too long in the bathroom, hanging mixed laundry on line outside the home they shared. Ignis called it a modified symbiosis. Though he wasn’t sure he was wrong, Gladio was reluctant to call it that, the connotation being that he couldn’t live without them.

“It’s a facultative,” Ignis said by way of explanation. “It’s optional; you could live without us but you chose not to.”

Gladio narrowed his eyes. “You sayin’ you want me to go?”

“No, never. I’m simply trying to make you aware of the existence.”

“You talked this out with Prompto,” Gladio asked, akimbo arms crossing over his chest, to protecting himself from a barb that he was sure was not meant to sting in as much as it did.

Ignis nodded. “Of course, and he recognized what I said for truth.”

Ignis turned his head and for an instant Gladio waited to be hampered beneath the bright glint of a viridescent gaze. He waited for the heavy look that had sent many a man scurrying from the crystalline spires of the Citadel. He waited for a look which, almost without his knowledge, had set his heart to beating irregularly years ago. But it did not come. It never would again.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know or remember. He saw him every day and with his keen eyes, he’d mapped the scars of Ignis’ face, memorizing the deep imprints upon his skin. He had never felt them, but in the illusory, lonely place between sleep and wakefulness he had thought of them. He imagined the feeling, too, the roughness of a blemish, the dips and hollows that were now as sure a part of Ignis as his wit. He never had the audacity to try to touch them, however, and now his body was paralyzed, hovering in a space in which he dearly wished he could turn back time or claim the moment, placing his hands upon the rough planes of Ignis’ cheek and mapping them for real. As it was, he did neither, sending a huff of derision in the blind man’s direction.

“ _Your_ truth. Doesn’t mean it’s mine.”

Ignis smiled. “There’s only one truth, now. I don’t believe in shades of grey, not anymore.”

He didn’t know why, but he hastened to leave. He mumbled paltry excuses on the heels of his departure, loath to stay. There had been an expression, a sad one which he could not quite qualify on Ignis’ face. It had hurt to see. So, in an instant, he decided that he wouldn’t. As Gladio made his retreat, he turned back, only to find Ignis still facing the empty space where he’d just stood. He felt awful, but decided not to think about that, either.

For the rest of the night Gladio gave him the widest berth possible, only to find his avoidance reflected in kind. They moved with a finesse born of fighting, a terse dance, shifting to avoid contact, occupying the same space but pressing for the advantage of distance. Prompto felt it. Gladio knew he did, sneaking furtive glances at that pair of them over dinner, injecting even more enthusiasm than usual into his jokes. He acted in a way which was more reminiscent of his former self than his current one. He complimented the dinner Ignis made. He cleared the dishes. When it was clear that both Gladio and Ignis would not be swayed, he sighed, making excuses and confining himself to his room.

“I’ll clean up the rest,” Ignis offered. “Enjoy the rest of your night, Gladio.”

In any other circumstance Gladio would have shrugged off the dismissal, helped, or least made a joke about leaving compliments to the chef. Tonight, he simply excused himself, quickly and quietly, with scarcely audible words of thanks.  Like Prompto, he hid in his room. His was sparser than the others; a few dusty tomes were spread over an oblong bookshelf, some turned open to a page, others stuffed with bits of paper to mark a place. His broadsword was a fixed mark in the corner, bracing against the wall, ready to be hefted when the need arose. There was no need now, which he supposed was part of the problem. With the daemons gone and life just beginning to restructure, finesse was what was needed. He never had an overabundance of that quality, and without the outlet to hit something hard and heavy in lieu of facing whatever the problem was, he was left only with discretion and diplomacy. He felt heavy.

Gladio tossed his weight upon his bed, the old frame rolling and creaking beneath his weight. Everything was aged here, even him, the expanse of years laden with toil and troubles adding a non-physical weight into the slant of his posture. He thought, considering why he’d gotten so upset by Ignis’ words. Ignis had said more, and more derisively in the past. He’d adopted a scathing tone on occasion and laid all comers out with witticisms and well-placed barbs. This was hardly that; it hadn’t even come close. The why remained elusive as he searched for answers in punched pillows and the study of peeling paint on the walls. He tossed and turned, sweating through covers though the air in the house was a frigid as Shiva’s corpse. He kicked them off and shivered against the cold. When he could do no more and only when he could do no more, did he finally resign to get up.

The night had come on him suddenly. He’d tossed and turned for hours but the lateness surprised him when he faced a ticking clock. He padded to the icebox, pulling out a beer he hoped would hasten sleep. He turned, for some reason, looking out the window and into the inky darkness. It wasn’t something he usually did, but he felt a strange compulsion. This was as surprising as finding a figure kneeling in the bare dirt outside the threshold. His eyes narrowed, making sure his sleep deprived eyes weren’t playing tricks. No, he knew the lithe strength of that back, he’d braced alongside it for years too numerous to count not to know it. That was Ignis out there, and he hadn’t a clue why. Gladio left his beer on the counter, grabbed a throw from off the sofa, and made his way to find out.

***

He moved quietly, careful not to frighten Ignis. It wasn’t shocking to find the other man turning to angle an ear in his direction despite his careful step. He knew Ignis’ other senses were sharper since he’d lost his sight.  


“Hello, Gladiolus.”

“It’s cold.”

He swung the blanket over Ignis’ shoulders, pleating fleece about an area which had gone thinner even under the intense scrutiny he usually paid to Ignis. How had that happened, he wondered, setting a hand over the crest of his right shoulder, fingers gently brushing over the curve of the clavicle.

“Do you want to know what I’m doing out here,” Ignis asked.

It would have been dishonest to say he wasn’t curious, but that wasn’t why he came out to check on him. In the many years he’d know Ignis, he’d never known him to be disheveled. Even upon finding him in Altissia, when he’d been discovered battered and broken, spread out between sharp ends of rubble and glass, he’d more closely resembled a man who was hurt than one who hadn’t take care. This Ignis was unkept in a way Gladio had never seen him. His sandy hair stuck up in haphazard peaks, perfect coif disturbed. He was on his knees; dust of burnt sienna having seeped into the fabric of his pajamas in a way in which would not ever clean. But his hands, his hands, were the most telling. The long elegant fingers were stained, too, ruddy clay beneath the nails which were cracked and torn and sluggishly bleeding. Beside him was a pile of displaced dirt, the swell of it telling that something was banished beneath the granules. He’d buried something but Gladio’s concern was completely focused on the man rather than what he’d been doing.

“Not unless you want to tell me.”

Ignis’ hand reached to cover Gladio’s and Gladio let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Stained fingers wrapped around his wrist, pulling, drawing him down into the earth to sit beside him. Gladio went willingly, sliding into place, close enough to feel the shuddered breath at his left. They sat in the quiet, a score of minutes in which nothing happened, before Ignis turned. He opened his mouth, and laid that mouth against Gladio’s. A quick, curious flick of a tongue parted Gladio’s lips. Poised to speak, Ignis had easy access and took swift advantage. He conquered him with a kiss, bright and poignant, smiling against his mouth.

Startled, he pushed him away. He wrestled him to arm’s length, watching the downward turn of Ignis’ mouth as they separated. He felt the loss like a punch to the gut.

“I swore I had the right of it. Your eyes, you seek me out,” Ignis explained. “I can feel them on me. It’s not the same with Prompto, or I thought…did I misjudge, is it only worry that makes you–“

It wasn't worry, or at least only a small part of it could be considered worry. Perhaps it was conflated with a warmth that only Ignis could kindle in him now. He did watch him, in awe of his tenacity of will and his ability to prove even Gladio wrong with what he could accomplish in total darkness. He watched his elegance with admiration and respect, in possession of a grace he would never enjoy. He ached with wonderment. He ached now. He wanted him, too, to enjoy him in an intimate way. He’d never known, or perhaps he always had and never allowed himself to accept it.

Puzzle pieces fell into place as he reached for Ignis this time, pulling him back into his space. He was angry earlier because Ignis had suggested the symbiosis as a need of him, that they needed each other, in a way that had everything to do with who they’d been and who they’d been it to. Maybe it was Noctis and duty that had brought them together but Noct had played no role in this. The want in his belly, the tension around his heart for Ignis alone, the fondness of watching him cook in their ramshackle kitchen – his fingers curled under, more tentative than he once had been but just as strong. He put all these feelings into the act of kissing Ignis, to tell him without words that he wasn’t wrong about Gladio’s feelings, crushing their lips together.

The surprise had worn off, a second kiss in so many minutes, but the novelty stayed fresh. He tasted of peppermint and the soft warmth of his mouth was closer to the pages of Gladio's favored romances than any kiss he’d known. It held him in bewilderment, burrowing his hands into the softness of the blanket he’d lain over his shoulders and pulling him closer still.

“I’m gonna keep kissing you,” Gladio whispered against his mouth.  He dragged the knuckle of one hand over the scars he’d so often thought of touching. They felt differently than he imagined, the cross hatches raised higher, catching on blunted nails. It hurt to know the feeling but it bolstered his resolve. He did not know if Ignis had kissed him because he needed someone, not Gladio in particular, but a warmth and a care that could had been anyone willing. He would not confuse his sudden realization with what Ignis might have felt. Knowledge on what that meant would come in time. For now, he would hold him close, put his lips upon Ignis’ and not ask the questions which like an ever spinning reel spooled in the recesses of his mind.

“Why?”

He kissed him again, more gently this time. A chaste press of lips that felt the curl of Ignis’ match him for passion and softness. He closed his eyes, pulling him into an embrace.

“Because, it’s what people do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about XV and Gladnis on tumblr @ ofthekingsglaive.
> 
> Comments and kudos soothe this girls soul. Please leave some.


End file.
